Painting apparatuses generally called paint rollers are known in which a cylindrical paint brush is fitted on to a roller. The roller is rotatably connected to a handle such that a user can roll the cylindrical paint brush along a wall surface to transfer paint from the paint brush to the wall surface. In the most common design, the handle is only one to two feet long.
In many painting applications, it is necessary for the user to access hard-to-reach locations. For example, with interior painting of walls and the like, a user typically can not reach the ceiling of the room simply with an out-stretched arm and a typical paint roller. Accordingly, ladders and scaffolding are commonly employed in such situations. While effective, they are relatively expensive alternatives, and are relatively difficult to assemble and move about a work site. Furthermore, a dangerous situation can easily arise in which a user leans to far away from the ladder and could possibly tip over and injure him or herself.
Accordingly, it is often the situation that a user will employ an extension pole to which the paint roller can be attached. For example, paint rollers can be provided with a handle having a plurality of internal threads at a base thereof. A pole having a complementary diameter and a series of external threads can therefore be threadably attached to the paint roller to thus increase the reach of the user. However, in order to provide a secure attachment between the pole and the paint roller, a relatively large number of threads are provided and thus a relatively large number of rotations are received for the pole to be fully attached and detached from the paint roller. If the user is moving back and forth between a situation wherein the extension pole is needed and not needed, he or she is therefore confronted with attaching and detaching the pole from the paint roller a number of times during the painting process. This necessarily slows the work flow and can be frustrating to the user.
Such extension poles are also often advantageously employed with accessories other than paint rollers, such as but not limited to, pad painters, paint brushes, dusting tools, light bulb changers, etc. While such accessories often have threaded handles, the threads may be provided at various dimensions or pitches, especially due to the multiple manufacturers of such devices. Adapters for each, or extension poles for each, have therefore been required to connect to each different thread configuration.
Other handles have been developed in which the user slides multiple cylinders that telescope over each other to extend the handle. These cylinders are independent of each other, and so to extend the handle to its full length, the user must extend each cylinder relative to the next one. This may take several steps, and the user may even need to grab the paint roller mat or wire area supporting the roller mat in order to extend it relative to the last cylinder. While effective, this may undesirably dirty the hand of the user.
While the disclosure is susceptible to various modifications and alternative constructions, certain illustrative embodiments thereof have been shown in the drawings and will be described below in detail. It should be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the disclosure to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions, and the equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention as defined by the appended claims.